The relation between one and the other is also clearly a relevant matter for discussion. But the confusion of one with the other is fatal. In the field of morals we are perhaps led astray in our judgments even more frequently than in matters of politics. Mr. Shaw's plays are often denounced by critics whom they have made laugh till their sides ached, and the reason is that, after leaving the theatre, the critics remember that they do not like Mr, Shaw's moral ideas. In the same way, it seems to me, a great deal of the praise that has been given to Mr. D.H. Lawrence as an artist ought really to be given to him as a distributor of certain moral ideas. That he has studied wonderfully one aspect of human nature, that he can describe wonderfully some aspects of external nature, I know; but I doubt whether his art is fine enough or sympathetic enough to make enthusiastic anyone who differs from the moral attitude, as it may be called, of his stories. This is the real test of a work of art—has it sufficient imaginative vitality to capture the imagination of artistic readers who are not in sympathy with its point of view? The Book of Job survives the test: it is a book to the spell of which no imaginative man could be indifferent, whether Christian, Jew or atheist. Similarly, Shelley is read and written about with enthusiasm by many who hold moral, religious, and political ideas directly contrary to his own. Mr. Kipling's Recessional, with its sombre imaginative glow, its recapturing of Old Testament prides and fears, commands the praise of thousands to whom much of the rest of his poetry is the abominable thing. It is the reviewer's task to discover imagination even in those who are the enemies of the ideas he cherishes. In so far as he cannot do this, he fails in his business as a critic of the arts.

It may be said in answer to all this, however, that to appeal for tolerance in book-reviewers is not necessary. The Press is already overcrowded with laudations of commonplace books. Not a day passes but at least a dozen books are praised as having "not a dull moment," being "readable from cover to cover," and as reminding the reviewer of Stevenson, Meredith, Oscar Wilde, Paul de Kock, and Jane Austen. That is not the kind of tolerance which one is eager to see. That kind of review is scarcely different from a publisher's advertisement. Besides, it usually sins in being mere summary and comment, or even comment without summary. It is a thoughtless scattering of acceptable words and is as unlike the review conceived as a portrait as is the hostile kind of commentatory review which I have been discussing. It is generally the comment of a lazy brain, instead of being, like the other, the comment of a clever brain. Praise is the vice of the commonplace reviewer, just as censoriousness is the vice of the more clever sort. Not that one wishes either praise or censure to be stinted. One is merely anxious not to see them misapplied. It is a vice, not a virtue, of reviewing to be lukewarm either in the one or the other. What one desires most of all in a reviewer, after a capacity to portray books, is the courage of his opinions, so that, whether he is face to face with an old reputation like Mr. Conrad's or a new reputation like Mr. Mackenzie's, he will boldly express his enthusiasms and his dissatisfactions without regard to the estimate of the author, which is, for the moment, "in the air." What seems to be wanted, then, in a book-reviewer is that, without being servile, he should be swift to praise, and that, without being censorious, he should have the courage to blame. While tolerant of kinds in literature, he should be intolerant of pretentiousness. He should be less patient, for instance, of a pseudo-Milton than of a writer who frankly aimed at nothing higher than a book of music-hall songs. He should be more eager to define the qualities of a book than to heap comment upon comment. If—I hope the image is not too strained—he draws a book from the life, he will produce a better review than if he spends his time calling it names, whether foul or fair.

But what of the equipment of the reviewer? it may be asked. What of his standards? One of the faults of modern reviewing seems to me to be that the standards of many critics are derived almost entirely from the literature of the last thirty years. This is especially so with some American critics, who rush feverishly into print with volumes spotted with the names of modern writers as Christmas pudding is spotted with currants. To read them is to get the impression that the world is only a hundred years old. It seems to me that Matthew Arnold was right when he urged men to turn to the classics for their standards. His definition of the classics may have been too narrow, and nothing could be more utterly dead than a criticism which tries to measure imaginary literature by an academic standard or the rules of Aristotle. But it is only those to whom the classics are themselves dead who are likely to lay this academic dead hand on new literature. Besides, even the most academic standards are valuable in a world in which chaos is hailed with enthusiasm both in art and in politics. But, when all is said, the taste which is the essential quality of a critic is something with which he is born. It is something which is not born of reading Sophocles and Plato and does not perish of reading Miss Marie Corelli. This taste must illuminate all the reviewer's portraits. Without it, he had far better be a coach-builder than a reviewer of books. It is this taste in the background that gives distinction to a tolerant and humorous review of even the most unambitious detective story.

THE END